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When Women Stopped Coding

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Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#181

Post by cheez »

tonyplee wrote: post #37

I have 15 year old daughter and would love to get her more interested in computer science. She is doing good in school getting A in math/science, etc. Any suggestions from HN on how best to guide her interests? Extra project? incentive? For now, her interests are typical teenage - school clubs, facebook, youtube, tumblr, etc.

Put her in a class and don't give her a choice. Tell her if she doesn't enjoy it, you won't send her next year. So far, I have sent my daughter to:

- Debate - Computer programming - Cooking - Soccer - Skating - Hockey (upcoming) - Fashion design

The only one she didn't enjoy was cooking so I didn't send her back. But she does ask me for more girly stuff though I don't know what that looks like :(

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#182

Post by camillomiller »

inmygarage wrote: post #21

I am a female born in 1983 and have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it. I was in advanced math classes my entire life and placed out of calculus in college. I took a summer programming class at a different university in 2000 and fell in love with programming. But when I got back to school, I took another CS class that was exactly as described in this…

Same here, I dropped off of Informatics Engineering (that's CS engineering in Italy) partly for the same reasons, even though I had very good grades and liked it. I ended up working in the field anyway. I ended up getting a BoA while working, though. Plot twist: I'm a male. That's not to say that your examples doesn't apply, far from it. But as someone else commented, the environment on those courses... wow, that's really far from the culturally stimulating CS environment I envisioned before enrolling.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#183

Post by maddening »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #73
nathan_long wrote: post #2

This story makes a compelling case that women stopped programming because - 1. Computers started being sold as consumer products - 2. They were marketed almost exclusively to boys - 3. Boys played with computers and learned about them, while girls were made to feel that computers weren't for them - 3. Men showed up to college with more computer experience - 4. Women felt they must not be "naturally good" at computers…

In the Eastern Bloc countries nobody bothered to market computers, for many reasons including closed off markets and economical disasters. They also valued gender equality a lot. But the end result was absolute the same - massive male domination in everything computer-related. So i's not marketing.

I talked with some of my female friend who were studying CS, and asked them why they many of them gave up on programming and moved on to management or so other non-technical position.

The answer was that programming was boring and exhausting. From what I understand being code monkey who spends 40 hours a week debugging, writing crap code and checking tests with the most repetitive and non-creative manner doesn't gave them as much sense of an achievement as it gives to some men. Hell, I have doing that kind of job and only push on due to money and fact that 95% jobs in the area looks exactly like that. (And the rest 5% requires you tho know right people.)

I would say that there is relatively little of masochist women who would want to debug that race condition hell in C++/Java. There you have to endure a lot of frustration before reaching a (short) moment of satisfaction. On the other hand in some Rails startups that I know, where effect of your work was immediate and one didn't felt that she was hitting the wall all the time there was a lot more of girl programmers - about a half of the team. But there are very few of such startups in my neighborhood. All in all I've got more men around.

TL;DL - women are less of a masochist when it comes to frustrating jobs.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#184

Post by Dewie »

cauterized wrote: post #162
guard-of-terra wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Computer Science field has innate properties that discourage the female sex (biologically) from it"? Why is it fantastic? Because last time I've checked, women were also less interested in recreational fishing than men.

And why should recreational fishing be biologically less appealing to women than men either? - from a woman who quite enjoys fishing, tyvm

"Should"? They "shouldn't" be one thing or the other. They, as a group, seem to be, but why is that a threat to you if you like fishing? Just because there is a pattern to something, doesn't mean that that pattern is good (or bad, for that matter).

Why do we take such offence when people point out a trend or pattern, and we ourselves are an exception to that pattern (I say "we" as in many people, including myself)? Is it because we think being normal is superior to being unusual, and that we not being part of something that some other person thinks is normal is an implicit threat to our threat as normal people?

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#185

Post by dneronique »

inmygarage wrote: post #21

I am a female born in 1983 and have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it. I was in advanced math classes my entire life and placed out of calculus in college. I took a summer programming class at a different university in 2000 and fell in love with programming. But when I got back to school, I took another CS class that was exactly as described in this…

> feelings of isolation and frustration

I am a female born in 1987 and have similarily been interested in programming for a long time.

After reading several comments, I'm getting some sense of resentment that you were driven away from your passion while others were able to stay on course despite similar obsticles. I in no way wish to diminish their accomplishments or claim any secret insight into any hardships they had to overcome or did not have to overcome; however I feel there are some aspects that are unique to the female experience of 'isolation and frustration' in learning how to program that I wanted to clarify:

Starting off, it is not at all unusual to be the only female in the class/room. The reason this is horrible is not because there's no one to talk to or connect with, but because it's completely impossible to shake off the feeling that everyone is watching you, very closely, all the time. Having this constantly on your mind hurts your concentration, your productivity, and your ability to freely explore ideas without judgement - a very important part of learning. This is something that the female needs to come to terms with and learn to be comfortable in her own space regardless.

Second - and this one hurts to type because I can feel the coming backlash - you programming gentlemen can be a bit too... helpful. When a female does need extra help in understanding something, help is appreciated and needed! However, when several people, usually male, come at you at once wanting to help it can be a negative experience. As good intentioned as this is, it is incredibly frustrating for me for three reasons: 1) the more people that want to help only fortifies the pervasive paranoia discussed earlier, 2) the more people that want to help me highlights my knowledge gap and is incredibly discouraging, and 3) gentlemen, when helping a lady in need of something, you tend to get a sense of bravado and in an effort to show us something, you end up just doing it for us. When this happened to me, I not only missed out on an opportunity to do a task myself and learn, it also served to fortify the sense of "move aside, young lady, and let the men take care of this." Furthermore, once a female smarts up to this enough to be brave enough to refute said help, she will often do so in an unappealing way until she learns what gets the best response. I want to point out that I don't blame yall males at all, and this is something a female will need to learn to deal with.

For the record, I stuck with it and got my CS degree. I think this has more to do with stubbornness than fortitude.

All this said, however, I've come to be pretty blind to the gender gap in my day to day and try to shy away from these types of conversations because there is no winner. Starting any field of study will have its own set of unique challenges that every student needs to overcome. Right now, for females as well as males in software, one of those challenges is how to treat the gender gap. I'm pretty much over it.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#186

Post by guard-of-terra »

stdgy wrote: post #159
guard-of-terra wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Computer Science field has innate properties that discourage the female sex (biologically) from it"? Why is it fantastic? Because last time I've checked, women were also less interested in recreational fishing than men.

And those properties that statistically discourage an entire sex from pursuing Computer Science are... The problem is that I have seen no significant evidence to support such a claim. And on the flip side, it seems rather straightforward to argue for culturally guided decision making. Marketing, toys(Barbie vs Tools), socially approved courses(home economics vs woodshop), socially approved professions, 'traditional'…

There are places where no such marketing occurs, but the result is predictably same.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#187

Post by colomon »

kazinator wrote: post #165

Note that Autism and Asperger's Syndrome are "male dominated". Something like 4:1. If you have a field toward which nerds gravitate, it will become male-dominated. What happened around 1984? Yes, home computers were becoming much more common as the article aptly notes. But what else? It was becoming obvious that the people who flocked to these things most, who outright related to these computers, were nerds. Popular…

Autism gender ratio is 5:1, actually. Presumably (given current definitions) that includes Asperger's as well.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#188

Post by daveloyall »

cortesoft wrote: post #52
daveloyall wrote: post #35

[...] when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes [...] Doesn't anecdotal evidence suggest that children quickly exceed their mentors (parents) when exposed to 1980s consumer hardware? (That hardware was deterministic--same key sequence means same result every time. You know, like video games from the same era.) Being exceeded by your child can be a dramatic emotional event. Are the feelings that a fathe…

I am pretty sure all computer hardware is deterministic? (unless we are talking about quantum computers?)

The deterministic nature of computer hardware used to be apparent during interaction with the computer.

Novices would quickly learn to carry out common actions 'blind'.

You could memorize a sequence of keystrokes and experiment with changing parts, or leaving out parts, to develop variations, or shorter but equivalent sequences.

The user interfaces of older computers were also orders of magnitude faster. If you were to time travel back to the 1980s and try to show off a smart phone to 8-bit hobbyists, I predict that they'd frequently attempt to remove the battery: "It seems to be stuck in a loop!"

Some might blame multi-threading, some might blame storage and communication latency... I blame planned obsolescence and the 'Halloween Documents' come to mind.

Most users were not introduced to real computers. They were introduced to products, products engineered to optimize for profitability.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#189

Post by makeset »

vorg wrote: post #105
nathan_long wrote: post #2

This story makes a compelling case that women stopped programming because - 1. Computers started being sold as consumer products - 2. They were marketed almost exclusively to boys - 3. Boys played with computers and learned about them, while girls were made to feel that computers weren't for them - 3. Men showed up to college with more computer experience - 4. Women felt they must not be "naturally good" at computers…

I would add: 6. Males are far more likely to enter jobs they're not suitable for Of all the "programmers" without any aptitude that seem to plague corporate IT departments, virtually none of the ones I've come across have been female. If you take out these frauds when counting programmers, then the gender balance in many IT departments becomes more like the early 1980's. Added: When programming became a perceived sta…

I've met more than a few women who majored in computer science and were then diversity-hired into corporate positions involving programming, with no skills or aptitude for it beyond sophomore-level class projects. They tend to get shuffled around to less technical positions eventually.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#190

Post by grimtrigger »

cortesoft wrote: post #50
grimtrigger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this explanation extremely hollow. Most programmers didn't start programming when they were kids. They started when they realized it was a good paycheck.

Any data on that? I tried searching for info on when the average programmer started, but couldn't find anything. I always figured most programmers started young, but that might just be because so many in my group started really young.

No data, just anecdotes
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